John Hollinger doesn't care much for the new-look Bulls:
Quote:
Burning question: Is there enough shooting?
There are a lot of questions one could underline here, the most obvious of which is “what exactly are we trying to do here?” Going all-in with assets just to reach the point of quasi-respectable averageness leaves the obvious unanswered question of how to get beyond it.
But let’s see the glass half full and suppose the overarching strategy pays off. Below the surface, another important micro question looms for a team that was 19th in offense: Is there enough shooting here to succeed as a modern NBA offense?
Chicago was respectable in the 3-point department a year ago — 13th in accuracy and 18th in frequency — but other than LaVine, even the drivers of that performance are mostly gone. Markkanen might have been a frustrating player, but he shot 40.2 percent from 3 on 10.2 attempts per 100; no other Bull aside from LaVine came anywhere near that, and none of the newbies do, either.
The only other Bull to take more than 200 attempts and make more than 35 percent was White, who might be out of a job this year. Valentine and Temple didn’t shoot lights out, but they were fourth and fifth on the team in 3-point attempts. Just replacing that volume will be a challenge, especially with a key perimeter player, DeRozan, shooting 3s once every leap year.
The biggest hope for offsetting 3-point accuracy would come from Vucevic, who made a career-best 40 percent last year on the season and 38.8 percent as a Bull. In terms of volume, there’s also Ball. He’s quietly become one of the league’s most improved shooters; his 12.4 attempts per 100 last season would have led the team, and he made 37.8 percent of them. And Williams, though he much preferred wandering into two-dribble pull-ups, made 39.1 percent of his rare 3-point attempts. Even with DeRozan a non-entity from the arc, there is a glass-half-full case that the starting five will have plus shooting.
As for the bench … egads. White is by far the best marksman of this crew, but even he is pushing to get to league average, plus he’s still recovering from a shoulder injury. Caruso is accurate with his feet set (37.1 percent career) but needs a ton of time and space and thus shoots 3s infrequently. The others — Bradley, Jones, Green, Brown and the two Johnsons — are players other teams won’t even bother guarding at the line. The rookie Dosunmu shot 34.5 percent from 3 for his college career, so he likely won’t shift the equation much.
Projection
The Bulls made a lot of moves to improve on last season’s 11th-place finish, but when I run through all the projections for the East, I end up with Chicago finishing … 11th.
Look deeper, and the first sentence describes things too negatively. The Bulls surely will have a better record than a year ago. While my forecast says 11th, that’s something of a worst-case scenario; they will clearly outclass the four teams behind them and only project to finish a few games out of seventh. In other words, they’re likely a Play-In candidate whose positioning within that group might be heavily determined by chance.
The key factors are going to be how much DeRozan can actually move the needle in Chicago and whether the Bulls’ most-used lineups will have enough shooting to function at a high level. This team will need to score, because even with Markkanen gone, the Bulls won’t be a defensive juggernaut. Having LaVine, DeRozan and Vucevic as the three core pieces pretty much assures they’ll surrender some points, even with a few good defenders in secondary roles.
The one way Chicago could really exceed this prediction is the one spot we haven’t really talked about: Williams. A breakout year from the second-year pro could potentially solve a lot of problems, from the iffy 3-point shooting to the lack of a defensive stopper to the paucity of quality forwards. Alas, projecting such a leap so soon requires an extremely rosy view of his body of work. The same might be said of the Bulls’ offseason.
Prediction: 37-45, 11th in Eastern Conference
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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